Tag Archives: new york

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You gotta believe!

Being a Met fan means summer is the most painful time of the year.

Warning: This is a TMI post.

Anyone familiar with the Mets, is familiar with this phrase.  I often think it was cruel to raise me a Met fan when New York has a winning team but I am convinced the designated hitter rule is a crime against everything I hold holy.

Digression:  Baseball is special for a number of reasons.  There is no clock.  The season is like a pressure cooker — starts slow and leisurely and ends in a race that can be a nail biter.  One of my favorite things about the sport is that every player plays both offense and defense.  When you allow such a pivotal player — as the pitcher is — to not hit you change the batter/pitcher dynamic.  This produces pricks like Roger Clemens, whom I will love to hate until I die.  It’s just not how the game should be played and once again, love you Crash Davis, I believe there ought to be a Constitutional amendment outlawing astroturf and the designated hitter.

Anyway, back to my point.  Every year I practically live and die by the Mets. I even believed after what is regarded as one of the most historic collapses in sports.  You can read about that here.  I feel the need to elaborate on how seriously I take this.  I only wear Met blue nail polish.  When I watch a game I alternate between really watching and only having it on in the background.  Depending on how they are doing when I do either.  My Met clothing — Jose Reyes jersey, 1986 t-shirt, old school, blue satin jacket, hat, necklace — gets switched up  — are they doing better when I have the hat on?  Should I take the jacket off?  Now, I know I sound crazy — and I am — but any Met fan will tell you, we are a superstitious lot.  I know intellectually that nothing I do will impact the game — and I also know they can’r hear me when I yell at the TV.  My sports related Tourettes kicks in big time when I watch the Mets (and 4ers, tennis, etc.).

But despite all the loss and all the heartbreak, I believe in the Mets.  So why can’t I have the same belief in myself?  Because I have way more successes than the Mets (at least since 1986).  My successes & failures are not as public as a major baseball franchise will ever be but every day I succeed at my job, my writing and my other endeavors.  On occasion I succeed at doing stand-up comedy.  That rocks my world.

Yet, I still don’t give myself the faith I give the Mets.  Something is wrong with this picture.  You might be wondering why I am telling you this.  One goal I have for this year is to change that.  Because: I’m good enough, I am smart enough and doggone it, people like me. (Thank you Stewart Smalley.)  I have read that telling people about a goal makes it easier to achieve — or maybe you are more likely to succeed — and I want to make this happen.

It may be late for New Year’s resolutions but mine now are:

  1. Focus on doing ONE thing at a time.
  2. Remember that lesson I learned when trekking to Everest.  We would come to a hill that was super steep (going down was harder than up) and I would think there is no way I can make it all the way down that.  Then I would tell myself ok, maybe you cannot make it all the way but you can take the next step.  I made it base camp.
  3. Make at least five people I don’t know smile every day.  Work up to 10.
  4. Start to believe that I am more than my weight. And no, I am not the fattest person on earth like I like to think.  Plus this body got me up Kilimanjaro (19,341 ft) and made it to Everest Base Camp (18,192 ft) and that’s pretty awesome.
  5. Celebrate accomplishments and learn from setbacks.
  6. Be better to myself and the people I care about. (I have been a total asshat lately, to the people who have had to deal with me, and you know who you are, I am sorry.)

So there you have it.  My belated resolutions.  Back to your regular scheduled programming… political thoughts will be back tomorrow. Or later today.

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Crash and burn and survive to tell the tale

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I took a job with a BMG Classics.  This is one of my favorite stories from that job and my career.

It all started in 1998.  I was looking for a job and sent my resume to every person I had ever met.  I received a call from an acquaintance in New York who wanted to know if I would be interested in doing PR for a record label.  “Sure, why not?” said I and off I went to NYC to interview.  I had no confidence that this was going to pan out — had NO record company or music experience AT ALL. The upside of this was that I could not have been more relaxed.  It just seemed like an adventure.

Several weeks later, my phone rang again.  I hadn’t even gotten around to sending a thank you letter, card or email but the woman who interviewed me wanted to get information about my knowledge of jazz, which was about as much as my record label knowledge.  I was honest about it and told her I like jazz but could never find the time to look into it, what with all the work I was doing.  She offered me the job.  Two weeks later I started work as the Press and Promotions Manager for RCA Victor and Distributed Labels.  That’s a long title that really just means “publicist.”

How little did I know about the music industry?  I had never heard of A & R or liner notes.  “A & R” stands for artists and repertoire.  You probably knew that.

My roster included jazz and world music bands and artists such as the Chieftains, Andy Summers and Ravi Coltrane.  I was essentially the QB of the PR team.  I oversaw publicity for CD releases, tours, proper radio play, etc.  I learned early that my knowledge deficit could be used as an asset.  I called journalists and asked their opinion.  I am new at this but you are the expert, what do you think about …?  It was not unusual for me to be on the phone for HOURS with the same journalist, they love to talk about their opinion.  It was a win-win-win.  They got to pontificate on their favorite topic, I learned a lot and we ended up friends.  I think they found my honesty refreshing, too.  There were months when we weren’t releasing anything great and I would tell them that.  I don’t mean our new releases but RCA Victor has a pretty large repertoire and it was not uncommon to release compilations of older stuff.  One joke a colleague used to tell was that we were going to put a sticker on that read Never before released in this order.

One other thing about the industry that I did not know was how cut throat it is.  About three weeks after I started, most of my department was fired.  The woman who hired me? Gone.  The person above her? Ditto.  The structure went from being: me — my boss — her boss — the president of the company to being: me — president of the company.  And he couldn’t help me because he was new to the business, too — his background was in wine.

For the next six months, I had no real supervision.  That doesn’t mean my projects suffered.  Ravi Coltrane was in a piece in Rolling Stone (a first for my department).  Others did interviews with AP, Washington Post, New York Times, CBS/ABC & NBC News, NPR and others.  I kept the artists happy with updates about their coverage.  I planned record release parties, interviews, photo shoots, tour coverage, etc.  I worked my butt off.

After six months, they hired a new person who would become my boss.  When he started, he seemed nice enough.  He met with everyone in the department to ask what we did and assess our performance.  About a month later, he conducted reviews.  I remember thinking, as I walked in, that I had no reason to be nervous, I had performed well.  My job performance should speak for itself, I thought.  I did tell them — from the start — that I had no prior experience in music.

Famous. Last. Words.

The review started with This is going to be hard on you.  That was the bright spot of the meeting.  Truthfully, the only analogy that pops out from that was that it felt like that sentence was a diving board.  I leapt from that into a pool of hellishness.  The new boss, in keeping with the grand tradition of new bosses, wanted to bring his own people in. He didn’t want to fire me, he wanted me to quit.  I walked to my office, shut the door and spent easily a half hour putting my face back together after the monster cry I had.  My morning that day was spent working on a Hillary Clinton trip to NYC and my afternoon was spent being told that everything that had ever gone wrong at RCA Victor was caused by my time there.

Once home, I thought about the year I had and the work I had done.  I took the next day off to really sort through my thoughts.  By the time I got back, I was resolved to stay.  I had done a good job.  My boss wasn’t thrilled by this.  He said we had to go to human resources and work out how we could monitor my work better.  During our first meeting I told them both, Look, you hired me to be a passing QB, if you want me to run the ball, I will but you cannot change the rules without telling me and expect me to know.  I am not clairvoyant. Surprisingly, my boss agreed.  He thought I was going to fail.  I didn’t.

We had meetings with HR for the next few months.  Every week, he told us that he was impressed with my work ethic, the results I was getting and asked How are you so nice to me when I was so bad to you?  I didn’t admit that I used a Kids in the Hall trick — whenever I saw him from behind in the hallway, I would pinch my fingers together and say I crush your head, crush, crush!  I just told him I am a professional.

Funny side story:  On more than one occasion, he tried to sabotage me.  One staff meeting turned into the “Alyson Show” and I went through the status of all my projects — without notes — I knew what I was working on.  Another time we went out to dinner with two key journalists, he thought they would eat me alive.  They loved me.  We all went to the Village Vanguard after and in a stroke of awesomeness — Diana Krall, the president of the company and our group arrived at the same time.  I pulled the president aside and said “You know Diana, right?” (I had spent time with her in Canada that year).  When I looked over at my boss, the glare on his face almost melted my contact lenses.  It. Was. Amazing.

Eventually, I left RCA Victor.  When I did, I sent the following email to my coworkers, I had always heard Istanbul was an exciting place.  When I got the chance to go, I did and met great, fun and wonderful people, experienced new things and learned a ton.  But at the end of the day, I am not fron Istanbul and it is time for me to go home.  Thank you for everything.

The record industry did teach me a lot.  The lesson that my belief in myself should trump whatever others think has been a challenge sometimes but well worth it and has shaped how I view myself ever since.

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Not sad but not excited by the death of a terrorist

When something is thrown upwards, there is a point at which the object’s upward momentum and the force of gravity are equal. For some time period — even if it is incredibly small — when the object hangs suspended. That is the emotional space I have occupied since learning about Osama bin Laden’s death. Any relief/closure/positive emotion has been tempered by my normal instinct that death is bad and deaths, even of bad people, are not meant to be celebrated.

Now, I should confess a few things. I grew up on Long Island and live in Washington, DC. My emotional location vis-à-vis 9/11 had been a strange place. It remains one of the worst days of my life and few things would make me happier than seeing the towers built back exactly the way there were and despite knowing New York as well as I know any place on earth, I still get lost in lower Manhattan sometimes because I still look for the WTC when I get out of the subway. Growing up, that was my compass in the city. It may always be. These are the reasons, my liberal friends tell me my opinion of anything 9/11 related is less valid because I am too close to it.

At the same time, I will never think we should do to ourselves what the terrorists could not; destroy out way of life and take away our belief in the ideals that inspired our republic. Racial intolerance cannot be mistaken for vigilance against terrorism. We cannot convince anyone outside of the US  to believe that we believe in the importance of the rule of law if we do not apply it uniformly within the US. And the Bill of Rights is as important today as it was on 9/10/2001. These are the reasons my conservative friends tell me my opinions on this subject are less valid because I “do not understand the impact 9/11 had on America.”

You can see the paradox. One might think these opinions would give me more reason to hate Osama bin Laden but I don’t. I can’t. He doesn’t deserve that. The closest thing I have had to “joy” at seeing him be killed was when I laughed at a photo of President Obama that had the caption “I am sorry it took me so long to get you my birth certificate, I was busy killing Osama bin Laden.”

At the end of the day though, if I were to become the kind of person who celebrates any loss of life — even of someone as reprehensible as this mass killer — I just become more like them and I don’t want that.

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Thank you, Dan Snyder

That’s something I don’t get to say very often.  In fact, I have never even thought anything remotely like that.  This morning changed all of that.  Being the insomniac that I am, I was up tweeting when I came upon this gem:  http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/03/washington-redskins-to-washington-post-stop-using-our-name-56518.html.  I’ll save you having to read it; Dan Snyder was the Washington Post to stop using the Redskins’ name because he “wants to protect the brand.”  Personally, I think he would do more to help is brand by making them team suck less but that’s just me.

You see, I am a fan of a baseball franchise called the New York Mets.  Anyone who follows the sport knows the past few years have been tough ones for the team.  Two years in a row we had historic collapses – in fact last year was only marginally better because they sucked earlier in the season and no one had any illusions that they would make the post season.

Recently, my Mets have made news for other reasons.  The owner, Fred Wilpon, a man who has made breaking fans’ hearts an art form, lost a lot of the team’s money to Bernie Madoff.  Seriously.  Donald Trump has talked about stepping in to save the team.  If Trump makes one big public statement this year; I hope it will be that he has bought the Mets. (That’s wishful thinking, no one thinks he will only make one big announcement this year).  As big as this part of the team’s story is, it is only a distraction in the offseason.  The real story is that the team has a huge payroll and little to show for it.

All of this brings me back to Dan Snyder.  He makes me feel proud to be a fan of a team other than the Redskins (full disclosure: I am a 49er fan and thus required to hate the Skins).  As Mr. Wilpon has a talent for trading players in ways that give me nightmares, Mr. Snyder knows how to be a douchebag.  From suing season ticket holder to local papers for writing mean things about him, he likes being a jerk.  Soon after he bought the team, he had to move his family to a gated community because fans were ringing his doorbell to let him know what they thought.  Really.

So this morning’s news was only a surprise in that it made me happy that Fred Wilpon owns my favorite team.    That’s a second first this morning.

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So much going on and so little time to write about it.

1. Wikileaks; as a liberal, what is the party line I am supposed to follow here?

It seems there is one thing Americans of all political stripes have found something they can agree on; Julian Assange.  Politicians and pundits hate him.  My personal views are more nuanced.  Few ideas reside closer to my heart than freedom of the press.  I may not like that these documents were published but Mr. Assange is not the bad guy here.  Neither is the New York Times.  There is a villain here and that’s the guy who pretended to be downloading Lady Gaga and was really trolling for secrets to share with world.  A secondary villain is the piss poor security that let this guy access all these cables in the first place.

Mr. Assange seems to be a bit of a douchebag; arrogant and possibly delusional.  I do not share his worldview but that does not invalidate his right to have it.  US politicians have no business calling an Australian citizen that he is a traitor for leaking anti-US documents.  I also find it ironic that some people who fear the coming of a ‘one world government’ are under the impression that non-US citizens who don’t live in this country can possibly commit treason against us.  I have no idea if he is guilty of the crimes Sweeden has charged him with but see no reason for him not to face them.  It would not make sense for any court on the planet to send him to this country.  It is pretty clear that he would never receive anything close to a fair hearing here. We are just pissed off that we are embarrassed.

The New York Times also seems to have tried to be as responsible as possible when it came to what documents they released and what information was redacted.  Our system of government relies on the ability of the press to print the information they receive.  Again, it is not their job to keep US government secrets hidden away.  That’s the government’s job.

I read today that someone leaked tons of credit cards as a protest against any action against Mr. Assange.  Again, I am all about the freedom of the press but leave my personal credit information out of your protest, please.  That’s identity theft and your outrage does not justify this.

2. Tax cuts for everyone!

I think President Obama is doing pretty good job.  I feel like when he took office he faced what I like to call a Himalayan array of problems; each is gigantic when looked at independently but not so much when compared with each other.

My final verdict on the tax cut plan that the White House has worked out with some in Congress is both the best deal he was going to get and a little too far.  Well, not too far but too far, too fast.  I think the deal on the tax cuts for the uber-wealthy might have been a necessary evil but I would have liked him to publicly fight it.  I think Joe Scarborough has been dead on about this.  I would have liked to have heard him use the term hostage a week ago.  Truthfully, I would like to have heard that before the election.  Here’s the exact wording I would have liked to hear, “As a candidate for president, I said that I oppose the tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year.  I understand that the definition of wealthy differs in areas of the country where the cost of living is high.  I have asked the Republicans to consider extending all the tax cuts but those on individuals making more than $1 million a year.  They have refused to even discuss this and are threatening to hold tax cuts for the middle class hostage.  We cannot let them.”

That would not have guaranteed anything but would have made the lefties among us feel like he remembers who elected him.  It also may have made if this package was the best they could do, that the lefties in Congress could support this.

This is a minor point, really in the overall scheme of things.  Even more minor is one problem I did have with President Obama’s press statement.  He said “if they are (wondering) if I am itching for a fight I suspect they will find that I am.”  You suspect.  YOU don’t know if YOU are ready for a fight?  Seriously.  You should have a clearer idea of what is going on in own head.

3. Can we all agree that we all want the economy to create more jobs?  Can we get our politicians to skip to the part where they tell us what they propose we DO to make that happen?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is considering running for president.  Today he gave a speech in which he railed against Washington gridlock, partisan bickering and reiterated his desire to see the economy grow.  He was short on specifics and long on rhetoric.  It may not be fair to signal him out for something all candidates or would be candidates do but something about this speech got under my skin.  I wish we could just stipulate that we all want the economy to improve, kittens are cute and all humans are mammals and just get on with our lives.